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Collaborative model-driven software engineering fosters efficient cooperation among stakeholders who collaborate on shared models. Yet, the involvement of multiple parties brings forth valid concerns about the confidentiality and integrity of shared information. Unrestricted access to such information, especially when not pertinent to individual responsibilities, poses significant risks, including unauthorized information exposure and potential harm to information integrity. This work proposes a dual-layered solution implemented as an open-source Eclipse plugin that leverages the role-based access control policy to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of model information in collaborative modeling environments. The first layer limits stakeholders' access to the shared model based on their specific roles, while the second layer refines this access by restricting manipulations to individual model elements. By ensuring that stakeholders access only the information pertinent to their roles and are authorized to manipulate such information in accordance with their expertise and responsibilities, this approach ensures the confidentiality and integrity of shared model information. Furthermore, it alleviates information overload for stakeholders by enabling them to focus only on the model information relevant to their specific roles, thereby enhancing the collaborative efforts. 

The evolution of domain-specific modeling languages is crucial for maintaining their relevance and effectiveness as systems and requirements evolve. Typically, this process requires collaboration between domain experts and developers, but it often faces misunderstandings, misaligned goals, and communication barriers. These challenges can lead to language evolution misaligned with domain experts' intentions, stemming from their limited participation due to a lack of technical skills. Participatory modeling practices can mitigate these issues by involving domain experts throughout the entire language evolution process. We propose advancing to the self-mobilization level of participatory modeling, enabling domain experts to independently drive language evolution. This advancement requires tools that eliminate the need for technical metamodeling expertise. In this vision paper, we describe MetaMorph, a tool aimed to support domain experts in achieving self-mobilization in the evolution of domain-specific modeling languages. MetaMorph allows domain experts to specify changes to the underlying metamodel through existing model instances, providing instant feedback on the resulting evolved model. It also supports the automatic evolution and co-evolution of metamodels and models. MetaMorph aims to minimize the risk of inappropriate language evolution, accelerate the overall process, and enhance the adoption and acceptance of evolved languages.

Blended modelling is an emerging trend in Model-Driven Engineering for complex software architectures. It enables the modelling of diverse architectural aspects through multiple editing notations seamlessly, interchangeably, and collaboratively. Blended modelling is expected to significantly improve productivity and user experience for multiple stakeholders. To manually architect and build a blended modelling environment is not trivial. To support architects in this task, in the scope of the ITEA3 BUMBLE project, we have designed and developed a blended modelling framework that aids architects in designing and semi-automatically generating blended modelling environments for architecting software.

Introduction: Blended modeling aims at boosting the development of complex multi-domain systems by enabling seamless multi-notation modeling. The synchronization mechanisms between notations are embodied in model transformations. Manually defining model transformations requires specific knowledge of transformation languages, and it is a time-consuming and error-prone task. Moreover, whenever any of the synchronized languages or notations evolves, those transformations become obsolete. Methods: In this paper, we propose an automated solution for generating synchronization transformations in an industrial setting.

Results: The approach entails i) the specification of mapping rules between two arbitrary domain-specific modeling languages leveraging a mapping modeling language, appositely defined for this purpose, and ii) the automatic generation of synchronization model transformations driven by the mapping rules.

Discussion: We validated the proposed approach in two use cases. Although our main goal was to provide a solution for synchronization between graphical and textual notations of UML-RT state machines, the proposed approach is language- and notation-agnostic.

Interacting with a monolithic architecture model to describe the architecture of large-scale software-intensive systems can be a complex and daunting task. The plethora of various concerns being addressed in a single model can impede the ability of individual stakeholders to discern their aspects of relevance. Architectural views allow to spread the various concerns into multiple (smaller) models, each of which addresses a specific concern, thereby aiding architects to break down the complexity of the overall architecture. To enable that, the architectural language should be able to provide explicit separation of concerns, addressed by multiple and somehow separated language portions. For secure collaborative architecting, these portions should be equipped with access control mechanisms that ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the models.In this paper, we present our vision for the automated generation of portions of architectural (and more generically modeling) languages enhanced with access control mechanisms and co-evolution of the architectural portions in response to changes made to the base language.

In this note, we report on a half-day tutorial designed to introduce software architecture practitioners and researchers to the concepts and open-source implementations of blended modeling for software architectures. The tutorial covered blended modeling motivation and principles, generation of editors, generation of the synchronization infrastructure, and collaborative modeling techniques. Through presentations, examples, and demonstrations, participants explored the practical implementation of blended modeling environments that can be tailored to their specific needs. The note provides a detailed account of the tutorial sessions, including the main implications of a focus group discussion held in the final session of the tutorial. In the follow-up to the tutorial, we conducted a survey to assess participants' perceptions of blended modeling's usefulness within their contexts. Post-tutorial actions and survey results are discussed as well, providing valuable insight into the benefits and potential challenges associated with the adoption of blended modeling.

The ever increasing complexity of modern software systems requires engineers to constantly raise the level of abstraction at which they operate to suppress the excessive complex details of real systems and develop efficient architectures. Model Driven Engineering has emerged as a paradigm that enables not only abstraction but also automation. UML, an industry de-facto standard for modelling software systems, has established itself as a diagram-based modelling language. However, focusing on only one specific notation limits human communication and the pool of available engineering tools. The results of our prior experiments support this claim and promote the seamless use of multiple notations to develop and manipulate models. In this paper we detail our efforts on the provision of a fully blended (i.e., graphical and textual) modelling environment for UML-RT state-machines in an industrial context. We report on the definition of a textual syntax and advanced textual editing for UML-RT state-machines as well as the provision of synchronization mechanisms between graphical and textual editors. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Blended modeling is an emerging trend in Model-Driven Engineering for complex systems. It enables the modeling of diverse system-related aspects through multiple editing notations seamlessly, interchangeably, and collaboratively. Blended modeling is expected to significantly improve productivity and user-experience for multiple stakeholders. Case-specific solutions providing blended modeling, to a certain extent, for domain specific languages have been provided in the last few years. Nevertheless, a generic and language-agnostic full-fledged blended modeling framework has not been proposed yet.

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and generic blended modeling framework prototype that provides automated mechanism to generate graphical and textual notations from a given domain-specific modeling language. Moreover, it offers a flexible editor to get expert’s feedback on the mapping between graphical and textual notations. The proposed prototype is validated through a proof-of-concept on the Portable test and Stimulus Standard use-case. Our initial results indicate that the proposed framework is capable of being applied in different application scenarios and dealing with multiple domain-specific modeling standards.

Blended modeling aims to improve the user experience of modeling activities by prioritizing the seamless interaction with models through multiple notations over the consistency of the models. Inconsistency tolerance, thus, becomes an important aspect in such settings. To understand the potential of current commercial and open-source modeling tools to support blended modeling, we have designed and carried out a systematic study. We identify challenges and opportunities in the tooling aspect of blended modeling. Specifically, we investigate the user-facing and implementation-related characteristics of existing modeling tools that already support multiple types of notations and map their support for other blended aspects, such as inconsistency tolerance, and elevated user experience. For the sake of completeness, we have conducted a multivocal study, encompassing an academic review, and grey literature review. We have reviewed nearly 5000 academic papers and nearly 1500 entries of grey literature. We have identified 133 candidate tools, and eventually selected 26 of them to represent the current spectrum of modeling tools.

Modelling tools traditionally focus on one specific editing notation (such as text, diagrams, tables or forms), providing additional visualisation-only notations. For software-intensive systems with heterogeneous components and entailing different domain-specific aspects and different stakeholders, one editing notation is too little and voids many modelling benefits. Seamless blended modelling, which allows stakeholders to freely choose and switch between graphical and textual notations, can greatly contribute to increase productivity as well as decrease costs and time to market. In this paper we describe our work in bridging two powerful (meta) modelling platforms: Eclipse Modeling Framework, for the definition of tree-based and graphical DSMLs and models conforming to them, and JetBrains MPS, for the description of textual DSMLs and the projectional manipulation of textual models via multiple views. The possibility to visualise and edit the same information in these two platforms, otherwise disjoint, can greatly boost communication between stakeholders, who can freely select their preferred notation or switch from one to the other at any time.